As Scrum Masters we are often very passionate about what is the “right way”, we see a lot of problems immediately, and we know how to fix them. Anton shares the story of such a moment in his career and how he started to accept that “everyone has their own journey”. His recipe is:
Gradually lead the time in the right direction. Don’t try to change everything at the same time.
Whatever you think is going wrong, reflect that back to the team and help them find their own solution. Be an Agile Mirror!
In this Episode we mention 2 important books:
The Human Side of the Enterprise by McGregor, the classic that introduced the Theory X and Theory Y model, which we discuss in this episode.
Turn the Ship Around by Marquee, a book on leadership that presents a model that is very useful for Scrum Masters.
About Anton Zotin
Anton is an Agile guy born in cold Siberia but with hot and passionate heart. He has worked in all sorts of companies and environments, and has been an agile fan since 2004. Nowadays works and lives in Berlin. And he deeply believes in people.
You can connect with Anton Zotin on LinkedIn, or find Anton Zotin on twitter. You can also ask him questions over email.
Many management approaches settle for measuring activity instead of outcomes. Marcus asks us to focus more on outcomes to be able to investigate the system conditions. After all it is outcomes that matter. He also asks us to be so precise about outcomes that we can measure it with a single metric. His process is:
Go for smaller and smaller iterations as a way to help teams “own” their work
Bring the outcome definition down to ground-level, so that everyone understands it
Everyone needs to understand the metric. Simplify it.
The metric needs to be one that changes often, so that we can use it as feedback.
Update the metric daily
Celebrate success
Marcus shared with us a discount code for all that purchase his book until October 14th, 2015. Don’t miss it, purchase the book at http://bit.ly/theKanbanBook, and use the code scrumkan.
About Marcus Hammarberg
Marcus is a Software / agile consultant from Sweden on IT-sabatical leave in Indonesia, working for the Salvation Army hospitals there. And yes, using techniques from agile in that work even in non-software environments.
One of those approaches he is using is Kanban, as Marcus is the author of the book Kanban in Action with Joakim Sundén, don’t forget to go to http://bit.ly/theKanbanBook, and get the book with the discount code scrumkan.
You can link with Marcus Hammarberg on LinkedIn, and connect with Marcus Hammarberg on twitter.
Scrum Masters measure their success in many different ways, Marcus chose happiness in his last project with a software team. He walks us through that and suggests that we use Niko, Niko index as a tool to measure happiness.
Marcus shared with us a discount code for all that purchase his book until October 14th, 2015. Don’t miss it, purchase the book at http://bit.ly/theKanbanBook, and use the code scrumkan.
About Marcus Hammarberg
Marcus is a Software / agile consultant from Sweden on IT-sabatical leave in Indonesia, working for the Salvation Army hospitals there. And yes, using techniques from agile in that work even in non-software environments.
One of those approaches he is using is Kanban, as Marcus is the author of the book Kanban in Action with Joakim Sundén, don’t forget to go to http://bit.ly/theKanbanBook, and get the book with the discount code scrumkan.
You can link with Marcus Hammarberg on LinkedIn, and connect with Marcus Hammarberg on twitter.
There are many questions we can ask in a recruiting interview, but not all help us find the right people for the job. In this episode Marcus shares with us the questions he goes to when the job is recruiting the best Scrum Masters out there.
Marcus shared with us a discount code for all that purchase his book until October 14th, 2015. Don’t miss it, purchase the book at http://bit.ly/theKanbanBook, and use the code scrumkan.
About Marcus Hammarberg
Marcus is a Software / agile consultant from Sweden on IT-sabatical leave in Indonesia, working for the Salvation Army hospitals there. And yes, using techniques from agile in that work even in non-software environments.
One of those approaches he is using is Kanban, as Marcus is the author of the book Kanban in Action with Joakim Sundén, don’t forget to go to http://bit.ly/theKanbanBook, and get the book with the discount code scrumkan.
You can link with Marcus Hammarberg on LinkedIn, and connect with Marcus Hammarberg on twitter.
When we introduce visualization methods in an already dysfunctional organization, there’s a tendency to see problems and point at the guilty parts. However, our dysfunctional processes are the result of the system conditions, not the people in the system. Marcus reminds us of that fact and asks us to hate the sin, not the sinner. He also shares a great tip to get started with visualizing the work in progress.
Marcus shared with us a discount code for all that purchase his book until October 14th, 2015. Don’t miss it, purchase the book at http://bit.ly/theKanbanBook, and use the code scrumkan.
About Marcus Hammarberg
Marcus is a Software / agile consultant from Sweden on IT-sabatical leave in Indonesia, working for the Salvation Army hospitals there. And yes, using techniques from agile in that work even in non-software environments.
One of those approaches he is using is Kanban, as Marcus is the author of the book Kanban in Action with Joakim Sundén, don’t forget to go to http://bit.ly/theKanbanBook, and get the book with the discount code scrumkan.
You can link with Marcus Hammarberg on LinkedIn, and connect with Marcus Hammarberg on twitter.
In many organizations we see teams rushing to adopt Scrum, only to be stuck in the Water-Scrum-Fall anti-pattern. Marcus shares with us one such case, and what he learned from the experience. He shares the metrics that matter in Agile, and why Lean is a perfect complement to the ideas of Agile and Scrum.
Marcus shared with us a discount code for all that purchase his book until October 14th, 2015. Don’t miss it, purchase the book at http://bit.ly/theKanbanBook, and use the code scrumkan.
About Marcus Hammarberg
Marcus is a Software / agile consultant from Sweden on IT-sabatical leave in Indonesia, working for the Salvation Army hospitals there. And yes, using techniques from agile in that work even in non-software environments.
One of those approaches he is using is Kanban, as Marcus is the author of the book Kanban in Action with Joakim Sundén, don’t forget to go to http://bit.ly/theKanbanBook, and get the book with the discount code scrumkan.
You can link with Marcus Hammarberg on LinkedIn, and connect with Marcus Hammarberg on twitter.
The team is the center point of the Scrum Master’s attention. But this is not enough for us to be successful as Scrum Masters. We must focus on the system the team is part of. In this episode we cover how to view the team within that system and how to help the team, and beyond.
We discuss the PDCA cycle which was popularized by Deming, and discuss the role of management within a system.
About Ebenezer Ikonne
Technology enthusiast. Change artist. Culture hacker. People focused. Helping organizations provide their employees with the most meaningful and fulfilling experience they could have while delivering solutions that change the world. Ebenezer is also a Tech Director at Mannheim.
You can link with Ebenezer Ikonne on LinkedIn, and contact Ebenezer Ikonne on Twitter. You can also read his thoughts on Agile on his blog.
In this episode, we cover what success means for Scrum Masters and what questions you can use to assess your own success
Is the team achieving its purpose?
Is the team fulfilling its goals?
Is the team working according to the agile values?
Is the journey of the team an enjoyable one?
Did I address the blockers in a timely fashion?
How did I help solve the conflicts productively?
We also discuss the importance and how to ask for feedback from the team and stakeholders.
About Ebenezer Ikonne
Technology enthusiast. Change artist. Culture hacker. People focused. Helping organizations provide their employees with the most meaningful and fulfilling experience they could have while delivering solutions that change the world. Ebenezer is also a Tech Director at Mannheim.
You can link with Ebenezer Ikonne on LinkedIn, and contact Ebenezer Ikonne on Twitter. You can also read his thoughts on Agile on his blog.
This a tale of caution when recruiting. Ebenezer tells us the story of a person that was hired after a flawless interview process. He knew everything, all the answers. But in practice things did not work as well as in the interview. We discuss questions to ask that might help detect when people’s knowledge is not in line with their practice, and other recruiting techniques.
About Ebenezer Ikonne
Technology enthusiast. Change artist. Culture hacker. People focused. Helping organizations provide their employees with the most meaningful and fulfilling experience they could have while delivering solutions that change the world. Ebenezer is also a Tech Director at Mannheim.
You can link with Ebenezer Ikonne on LinkedIn, and contact Ebenezer Ikonne on Twitter. You can also read his thoughts on Agile on his blog.
What are the conditions for great teams to emerge? And what are the obstacles? These are some of the questions we cover in this episode. We mention also two very important books about teams, and how to build great teams: Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances by Richard Hackman and The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization by Katzenbach and Smith.
About Ebenezer Ikonne
Technology enthusiast. Change artist. Culture hacker. People focused. Helping organizations provide their employees with the most meaningful and fulfilling experience they could have while delivering solutions that change the world. Ebenezer is also a Tech Director at Mannheim.
You can link with Ebenezer Ikonne on LinkedIn, and contact Ebenezer Ikonne on Twitter. You can also read his thoughts on Agile on his blog.
Scrum Masters are very often people motivated to improve the way we work. That’s an asset, but it can sometimes turn into a handicap. Ebenezer explains what he learned from his earlier experiences as a Scrum Master, when he tried to help people that were not ready to be helped.
We refer to the Bonus Podcast episode with Bob Marshall, as well as to the book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.
About Ebenezer Ikonne
Technology enthusiast. Change artist. Culture hacker. People focused. Helping organizations provide their employees with the most meaningful and fulfilling experience they could have while delivering solutions that change the world. Ebenezer is also a Tech Director at Mannheim.
You can link with Ebenezer Ikonne on LinkedIn, and contact Ebenezer Ikonne on Twitter. You can also read his thoughts on Agile on his blog.
Understanding the system we work within is a detailed and painstaking process of collecting and processing information. There are many questions we must ask as we collect that information. Gil shares with us the questions he asks to collect the right information about the system, and map the system conditions that affect the team.
In this episode we discuss Theory of Constraints, a body of knowledge that every Scrum Master should be aware of.
About Gil Zilberfeld
For over 20 years, Gil has developed, tested, managed and designed software products. He’s gone through failures and successes, in different types of projects and companies.
He has trained and coached developers how to write tests for their untestable code. He has worked with testers on complex applications and with very tight deadlines. He's helped release products that fit customer needs, by testing the waters, and getting their feedback integrated. He has implemented agile, kanban and lean principles and adapted them to fit teams better.
You can link up with Gil Zilberfeld on LinkedIn, or find Gil Zilberfeld on Twitter.
Gil is writing a book on Unit Testing. Check it out.
We often define success as one point in time, an achievement, a breakthrough. However, success happens over time, over many interactions. Success is, in fact, incremental. Gil explains his view on the success in our role as Scrum Masters.
About Gil Zilberfeld
For over 20 years, Gil has developed, tested, managed and designed software products. He’s gone through failures and successes, in different types of projects and companies.
He has trained and coached developers how to write tests for their untestable code. He has worked with testers on complex applications and with very tight deadlines. He's helped release products that fit customer needs, by testing the waters, and getting their feedback integrated. He has implemented agile, kanban and lean principles and adapted them to fit teams better.
You can link up with Gil Zilberfeld on LinkedIn, or find Gil Zilberfeld on Twitter.
Gil is writing a book on Unit Testing. Check it out.
There are many mistakes we make when recruiting, and Gil describes a good number of those mistakes. Recruiting is a skill that no one teaches you, but Gil shares with us what he has learned over the years.
About Gil Zilberfeld
For over 20 years, Gil has developed, tested, managed and designed software products. He’s gone through failures and successes, in different types of projects and companies.
He has trained and coached developers how to write tests for their untestable code. He has worked with testers on complex applications and with very tight deadlines. He's helped release products that fit customer needs, by testing the waters, and getting their feedback integrated. He has implemented agile, kanban and lean principles and adapted them to fit teams better.
You can link up with Gil Zilberfeld on LinkedIn, or find Gil Zilberfeld on Twitter.
Gil is writing a book on Unit Testing. Check it out.
There are many mistakes we make when recruiting, and Gil describes a good number of those mistakes. Recruiting is a skill that no one teaches you, but Gil shares with us what he has learned over the years.
About Gil Zilberfeld
For over 20 years, Gil has developed, tested, managed and designed software products. He’s gone through failures and successes, in different types of projects and companies.
He has trained and coached developers how to write tests for their untestable code. He has worked with testers on complex applications and with very tight deadlines. He's helped release products that fit customer needs, by testing the waters, and getting their feedback integrated. He has implemented agile, kanban and lean principles and adapted them to fit teams better.
You can link up with Gil Zilberfeld on LinkedIn, or find Gil Zilberfeld on Twitter.
Gil is writing a book on Unit Testing. Check it out.
Working as a Scrum Master requires a healthy dose of humility, and this is what Gil learned in this story. This lead to him learning about the importance of gaining trust, and also how to do it! He shares with us some practices on how to gain trust in teams that have a hard time trusting.
About Gil Zilberfeld
For over 20 years, Gil has developed, tested, managed and designed software products. He’s gone through failures and successes, in different types of projects and companies.
He has trained and coached developers how to write tests for their untestable code. He has worked with testers on complex applications and with very tight deadlines. He's helped release products that fit customer needs, by testing the waters, and getting their feedback integrated. He has implemented agile, kanban and lean principles and adapted them to fit teams better.
You can link up with Gil Zilberfeld on LinkedIn, or find Gil Zilberfeld on Twitter.
Gil is writing a book on Unit Testing. Check it out.
When trying to understand the system that affects our performance we can’t stay at the surface level. We need to dig deeper to find the real causes for performance problems. Matthias suggest that we measure our system to find what questions we should ask, and then ask “Why?” to help us understand that system.
About Matthias Seul
Matthias worked 10+ years as software developer and gravitated towards coaching in recent years. He is a tech enthusiast, board gamer, inventor and wild duck. Matthias believes in intrinsic motivation - thus he believes in Agile. He says that “together we can make projects a more fulfilling and successful work environment for all involved”.
You can link up with Matthias Seul on LinkedIn, and reach Matthias Seul on twitter. Matthias is interested in your questions and feedback, and you can reach him via email as well.
What are the KPI’ for us as Scrum Masters? Matthias mentions several KPI’s he looks at to evaluate his work as a Scrum Master. One stands out: Relationships. How do you measure relationships and their quality? That’s what we discuss today.
About Matthias Seul
Matthias worked 10+ years as software developer and gravitated towards coaching in recent years. He is a tech enthusiast, board gamer, inventor and wild duck. Matthias believes in intrinsic motivation - thus he believes in Agile. He says that “together we can make projects a more fulfilling and successful work environment for all involved”.
You can link up with Matthias Seul on LinkedIn, and reach Matthias Seul on twitter. Matthias is interested in your questions and feedback, and you can reach him via email as well.
Sure, CV and experience matter. But there’s something that matters more when hiring a Scrum Master. In this Episode we discuss what matters more than experience for Scrum Masters as well as how to integrate that into your recruiting process.
About Matthias Seul
Matthias worked 10+ years as software developer and gravitated towards coaching in recent years. He is a tech enthusiast, board gamer, inventor and wild duck. Matthias believes in intrinsic motivation - thus he believes in Agile. He says that “together we can make projects a more fulfilling and successful work environment for all involved”.
You can link up with Matthias Seul on LinkedIn, and reach Matthias Seul on twitter. Matthias is interested in your questions and feedback, and you can reach him via email as well.
User Stories needs to have certain characteristics before they can be interpreted and transformed into running-tested-code by the team. What are those characteristics? Matthias explains how he helped a team rein-in a planning process out of control with a very simple User Story maturity framework. A few simple steps to make sure your Stories are high quality.
About Matthias Seul
Matthias worked 10+ years as software developer and gravitated towards coaching in recent years. He is a tech enthusiast, board gamer, inventor and wild duck. Matthias believes in intrinsic motivation - thus he believes in Agile. He says that “together we can make projects a more fulfilling and successful work environment for all involved”.
You can link up with Matthias Seul on LinkedIn, and reach Matthias Seul on twitter. Matthias is interested in your questions and feedback, and you can reach him via email as well.
What does it mean to be a Scrum Master? Have you asked yourself that question? Matthias explains how he came to realize that being a Scrum Master is much more than knowing the process and helping teams grow as teams. It is especially about yourself. Listen to what Matthias considers one of the key skills for Scrum Masters.
About Matthias Seul
Matthias worked 10+ years as software developer and gravitated towards coaching in recent years. He is a tech enthusiast, board gamer, inventor and wild duck. Matthias believes in intrinsic motivation - thus he believes in Agile. He says that “together we can make projects a more fulfilling and successful work environment for all involved”.
You can link up with Matthias Seul on LinkedIn, and reach Matthias Seul on twitter. Matthias is interested in your questions and feedback, and you can reach him via email as well.
We must visualize our work in many different ways to be able to understand it. This is the key lesson by Juha when we talk about understanding the system of work.
He mentions several tools we can use to visualize our work: Value Stream Mapping and Kanban being two examples. And we discuss Torbjörn “Tobbe” Gyllebring’s presentation on Kanban that explains how to use Kanban as an improvement catalyst: Kanban is not your process, let me explain why.
About Juha Heimonen
Juha is a entrepreneur, programmer, kanbanista and a unicorn. He calls Software a garden, and says that he tries to be a gardener tending the soil as well as the specific plants.
He is active in the local agile community in Jyväskylä, Finland and also quite active on twitter.
You can link up with Juha Heimonen on LinkedIn and connect with Juha Heimonen on twitter.
You can find out more about his thoughts on Fellowship and how he applies that in his own business at Flowa’s website and blog.
Happiness is the metric for Scrum Masters to measure their success, according to Juha. We talk about the role of the process in making people happy, as well as the reasons why happiness is so important for Scrum teams.
We also discuss the book by Marshall Rosenberg: Nonviolent Communication, A Language of Life.
About Juha Heimonen
Juha is a entrepreneur, programmer, kanbanista and a unicorn. He calls Software a garden, and says that he tries to be a gardener tending the soil as well as the specific plants.
He is active in the local agile community in Jyväskylä, Finland and also quite active on twitter.
You can link up with Juha Heimonen on LinkedIn and connect with Juha Heimonen on twitter.
You can find out more about his thoughts on Fellowship and how he applies that in his own business at Flowa’s website and blog.
Hiring good people is hard, and hiring good Scrum Masters is no exception. To start with, the role of Scrum Master is very recent (started around 2000), and therefore we don’t have enough accumulated experience in the community, and all the good Scrum Masters are happily employed. But that’s not the only difficulty when hiring good Scrum Masters. How do you hire good people if the role is supposed to render itself obsolete? We tackle this and other questions that make hiring Scrum Masters hard.
About Juha Heimonen
Juha is a entrepreneur, programmer, kanbanista and a unicorn. He calls Software a garden, and says that he tries to be a gardener tending the soil as well as the specific plants.
He is active in the local agile community in Jyväskylä, Finland and also quite active on twitter.
You can link up with Juha Heimonen on LinkedIn and connect with Juha Heimonen on twitter.
You can find out more about his thoughts on Fellowship and how he applies that in his own business at Flowa’s website and blog.
Self-organization is not a simple “tool” you can just spring on teams by saying: “Self-organize! Now you don’t have any managers.” Juha explains such a process, why it failed and what he learned from it that can help you on the path to team self-organization.
Juha is a entrepreneur, programmer, kanbanista and a unicorn. He calls Software a garden, and says that he tries to be a gardener tending the soil as well as the specific plants.
He is active in the local agile community in Jyväskylä, Finland and also quite active on twitter.
You can link up with Juha Heimonen on LinkedIn and connect with Juha Heimonen on twitter.
You can find out more about his thoughts on Fellowship and how he applies that in his own business at Flowa’s website and blog.